Reader. Writer. Romantic.

So it’s been like two weeks since I started doing coding. Since I’ve been busy with the writing challenge, coding has mostly been a weekend endeavour, which is both great and shitty because since I’m not reinforcing my learning everyday, there are times I forget what I was doing last week. A better way I could be tackling this is treating it like a school course and take notes for everything (by hand because that’s how I learn best). If that’s the case then I’m definitely starting my courses over again.

This past weekend, I’ve moved into something called functions. Basically, functions allow for the programmer to input variables in order to display a particular message and have those variables change. Well, I was working along just fine when I came across the final two lessons of the module.

In particular, the preamble/lesson part of the page said that we couldn’t call on specific variables because they only exist within the function, but then when I got to the instructions it said to try it. In my head, all I’m thinking is, “it’s not going to work.” So I try it and, of course, I get a name error, which is what I expected to see. But then it shows an “x” in me completing the task meaning I can’t technically move on to the next part of the instructions (they’re just greyed out, doesn’t mean I can’t read them). So I tried moving on and doing it, but it still wouldn’t say I completed it. So, by this point, I’m super frustrated and ask to see the solution. Okay, fair enough, I messed up some of the coding along the way, so I copy the solution and reset the code to try going through it again. Nope, again it doesn’t work. So I paste the solution in (and by this time I’ve tried doing this four or five times already) and it immediately says I’m right. So I clear it again, write my code and paste the solution below to do a comparison. Everything matches, so why is it that my code is wrong and the solution is right?

I move on thinking, “okay well that will result in a name error so I just have to know not to do it or to define the term outside of the function aka before the function” and I get to the review section and what does it ask me to do? Yup, do the thing that results in the name error. So now I’m stuck and frustrated and don’t know what to do. I might redo the whole lesson and see if there was something I missed.